Dolezal said she has identified as being black since she was "really young," adding that "sometimes how we feel is more powerful than how we're born, and blackness can be defined as philosophical, cultural, biological, you know, it's a lot of different things to a lot of different people."

This reiterates what Dolezal said during an appearance on the Today show soon after the news broke in June and she lost her position as the president of the Spokane, Washington, chapter of the NAACP as well as a part-time teaching job at Eastern Washington University as a result of the misrepresentation. She noted then that she identifies racially as "human" and culturally as "black."

"I was drawing self-portraits with the brown crayon instead of the peach crayon," she said in June. "That's how I was portraying myself."

In July, she also told Vanity Fair that she identifies as being black.

"I've had my years of confusion and wondering who I really [was] and why and how do I live my life and make sense of it all, but I'm not confused about that any longer," she told the magazine. "I think the world might be – but I'm not."